In the 4 years since I first installed Xcode, the rating has barely changed. New versions of iOS have been released, Xcode has been updated, but the rating remains the same. In this article I will try to tell you what’s wrong.

Performance

Apple’s IDE is getting slower. On the 2014 Macbook Air, Xcode (2017 version) sometimes slowed down in large projects. The 2018 version was already slowing down significantly on the 2017 Macbook Pro.

For example, Playground, which is positioned as a sandbox for quick experiments with code, took several minutes to load. For which you can find a web compiler for Swift on the Internet and do whatever you need on a machine with any operating system.

Limitations

• Xcode only works on Mac OS, and updates to the IDE is strictly tied to versions of the operating system.
• Xcode must be updated to support new devices.
• The ability to use plugins has been disabled.
• You cannot just put a new version of an application into the Appstore from another computer (the owner of the computer from which the application was originally installed must provide you with a certificate file for this purpose).
• Xcode takes up a lot of space, which is especially noticeable on laptops. Xcode 12 requires at least 49 gigabytes of free space to install. To upgrade to a major version of the program, the same amount of space will be required.

Bugs

Here are the most annoying bugs, most of which appeared in Xcode 10 and have not yet been fixed:

• Debugging over WiFi is extremely unstable.
• Debugging over the wire works better, but there is often a situation where Xcode suddenly stops seeing the device.
• Storyboard crashes. No matter how busy your Storyboard is, it can stop rendering. And then you only have to look for the element that broke everything.
• Tying interface elements to code doesn’t work the first time 100% of the time.
• The larger the project, the more likely it is that autocomplete code will start to fail.
• The file tree lives its own life. After each program restart, the file tree often unfolds completely. There are no buttons to control it.
• As of version 11, the file tree may not react spontaneously to file moves. That is, visually changes will occur, but nothing will change in the project folder.
• Sometimes you just can not create a folder.